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Graphic: The Surging Momentum Behind Wikipedia's SOPA Blackout

The Internet’s most popular reference site has gone dark today to protest the SOPA and PROTECT IP acts. Wikipedia’s community of editors agreed to the one-day shutdown through the same sort of excruciating discussion that editors use to decide, for instance, whether Bono’s harmonica skills are worthy of mention in his biography. (To its credit, Wikipedia has an article that humorously details its lamest edit wars; you’ll have to wait until Thursday to read it.)

The decision-making process took place on a dedicated page. The combination of public discussion and excellent API makes it easy to mine the discussion page to get some statistics on the extraordinary conversation that has seen, according to the community’s statement, “by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia.”

From its creation on January 13 until its closure on Monday night, 1,891 Wikipedians made 4,014 changes to the blackout discussion page, which now stands at 100,115 words (roughly equivalent to a 300-page novel). The Wikipedia user known as Badon edited the page 82 times, more than anyone else.

To illustrate the scale of Wikipedia’s remarkable decision-making process, I’ve graphed the conversation that the site’s editors held over the weekend. There are a few spikes—for instance, when the user Yrtnegapparently duplicated part of the discussion, nearly doubling the length of the page—but the page grew consistently over the course of the weekend with little regard for time of day (which suggests the discussion was a worldwide effort, not focused in the United States). Click on the graph below for a larger version.

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